thijson

I think the opium war were also won due to weapon advantages. The British cannons could be fired from further away, they could handle larger charges of gunpowder than the Chinese. Another advantage of metallurgy. Today's jet engines are largely the same thing. Maybe the troops were also more battle hardened.

Also liked Dungeon Crawler Carl.

I've done some long trips with my i3. The key is to turn the engine on when the battery reaches 75%. The battery then absorbed the large power draws when accelerating or going up big hills. The engine does vary in RPM depending on my power draw, and by the end of my trip, the battery is usually not significantly lower, maybe around 60%. I usually turn off the engine when I'm almost at my destination so I can use the remaining battery energy.

I think that's becoming gold. That's why we're seeing the price action in it over the last few years. In a world with little trust, only gold is trusted. Even the Netherlands is repatriating a portion of their gold reserves from New York to London.

I wonder if heavy trucks pay correspondingly higher then. I would imagine the damage they do is disproportionately higher.

The government itself is the biggest criminal enterprise. I guess they are worried about being eclipsed.

Another policy is to charge EV's registration fees that are way higher than ICE vehicles.

Plug in solar is nice because you don't have to hire an electrician, just plug into an outlet.

The same thing happened in Afghanistan (to both Russia and the USA). Really has a David vs Goliath feel to it. Effectively the whole population is against you, so how do you win them over? No military strategy is going to be able to do that.

Smoking has morphed into vaping and zyn.

They have a term for it, it's called brain rot. That's what I witness them watching anyway.

I wonder if diamonds become cheap enough, and we are growing the crystal anyway, if we can introduce dopants and get interesting electrical properties.

I remember in the 90's there was some sort of shortage reportedly due to fires. In the end it was found the shortage was due to collusion by the manufacturers.

https://share.google/aimode/ewJpwCHUINOHzjBVg

It's a slow moving train wreck. I hope the consequences of these petulant actions scar the minds of voters for years to come. We're seeing the yield on treasuries creeping up, I think that's one of the consequences.

This is anecdotal, however I remember hearing about farmers trying to maximize for egg production. Multiple hens would share a cage. The initial criteria was to only breed the hen that produced the most eggs. Overall egg production declined though. It turns out that the best performing hen was doing so at the cost of the others, ie. eating more than its fair share, being combative. The strategy that worked in raising overall egg production was breeding all the hens from the best performing cage.

These kinds of late design decisions can cost a huge amount of money. And it may cost lives because it's now shoe horned in, less reliable.

Climate change is inevitable, whether we exist or not. The sun will continue to get hotter over the next few billion years. Life is a struggle, it sounds like you would rather just give up. I guess evolution is working as intended.

Our DNA was largely coded by prior generations that didn't really have a choice of reproduction, it just kind of happened because it's a natural result of sex. That connection has been severed in modern civilization. It's going to take a while for our DNA to adapt.

I think Greenspan called it hedonics.

Isn't that when the Fed stepped into the reverse repo market in order to allow the banks to extend and pretend?

Using Euro's apparently.

After typing in the program, I found that single stepping the program in a debugger greatly helped with understanding.

I'm sensing a pattern here. Weren't foreign made grid tied inverters just banned?

I remember something similar happening where software was going to be outlawed from export:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phil_Zimmermann

After a report from RSA Security, who were in a licensing dispute with regard to the use of the RSA algorithm in PGP, the United States Customs Service started a criminal investigation of Zimmermann, for allegedly violating the Arms Export Control Act.[5] The United States Government had long regarded cryptographic software as a munition, and thus subject to arms trafficking export controls. At that time, PGP was considered to be impermissible ("high-strength") for export from the United States. The maximum strength allowed for legal export has since been raised and now allows PGP to be exported. The investigation lasted three years, but was finally dropped without filing charges after MIT Press published the source code of PGP.[6]

We could only book our business travel through American Express. It must have made economic sense at the c suite level, I wasn't seeing it at my level, the flights were consistently more expensive.

I remember going to a university as a high schooler in the 80's and being amazed to see the GUI of an Apple computer, and the mouse pointer would change to an hour glass while waiting for something, When the hour glass filled, it would rotate and fill again. That animation blew me away, I was still using DOS at home.

Windows 3.11 was pretty unstable, because it wasn't using protected mode. I remember how unstable the Macs were back then too before the introduction of OSX.

Applications also had to voluntarily give up control of the CPU, cooperative multitasking. That's bad when an application crashes and takes down everything with it.

We used Proakis in grad school. For undergrad we used:

Communication Systems by Simon Haykin

I've watched youtube videos where the farmer is complaining that his million dollar combine has to do a regen cycle. Each hour that machine is running is costing the farm hundreds of dollars in depreciation.